Carcass
Legacy Name: Carcass

When I woke up, I was already back in my filthy cage, facing down, chained and naked. The pain on my abdomen and thighs was gone, but the wounds on my back and face were still bleeding. I could also feel the two broken rib bones, one of them poking out of my skin. It was always slower for such body parts to heal than that with more flesh. There were still two more hours till feeding time, and I was already craving for blood, only which could stop the pain.

My whole body ached as I tried to sit up. The chain on my neck was so heavy that I could barely breathe. My life should not end up like this! How I wished the darkest days of our kind never come! What was I? I used to be called a vampire. We were once the noble, beautiful, immortal and cruel creatures, consuming blood, dominating the world, and enslaving humans. But things changed after some human slaves escaped, and started to use science and technology against the vampires. Eventually, they found our ultimate weakness, a weakness that we ourselves did not even know: we could be completely paralyzed with the presence of a certain sound wave.

Then, the revolution and revenge began. Possessing the powerful sound wave devices, the once hunted became the hunters. Instead of terminating us, the humans chose to watch us suffer. We were caught, enslaved, and tortured. We weren’t called the vampires anymore, instead, they named us the undead and worthless carcasses. So what was I now? A carcass, whose fate was in the hands of the humans.

As the cage door opened, they turned on the sound wave. I watched the guard pouring blood onto the floor. Then, he stepped on my face, and laughed, “Here you go. Lick it off the floor, pretty carcass boy!” I could move again after he went out and locked the door. It was one of the most humiliating moments: licking blood off the floor. I knew they were watching me, enjoying every moment of it, but I had no other choices. Not drinking blood wouldn’t kill us; it would only stop the wound from healing, and force the humans to do things much nastier.

My wounds eventually healed completely in two days. And it was time for me to meet another client of the company, a man or woman who was somewhat sadistic. These human clients turned to this company to release their anger, to destroy something beautiful, and to fulfill their morbid fantasies. In other words, you could pay to torture or “kill” a carcass in order to pleasure yourself. The company had every torture device, needles, knives, cleavers, whips, guns, and the list would go on and on. The only rule was that you cannot completely chop off a body part of the carcass. But accidents did happen sometimes, especially when the clients got too excited. Of course, they needed to pay extra fees for that, because the carcass’ chopped ear or foot couldn’t heal back to the perfect state. The disfigured carcass would be discarded. However, none of us knew if that meant that we could have our ultimate death.

Carcasses were ideal for this kind of jobs ironically, because we wouldn’t die, and we healed by ourselves with the aid of a few liters of animal blood. So we could be recycled over and over, like reusable grocery bags. But could you imagine being killed over and over? Feeling the unbearable pain, humiliation, and then, death? To be honest, I was scared of the feeling of death, the ultimate helplessness, darkness, and emptiness. I’d rather never wake up, than being visited by death every couple of days.

Before the next client arrived, they paralyzed me, washed me, and dressed me up as the client required. This time, I was wearing a gray suit, looking like a wealthy business man. The client was a middle aged woman, well dressed. I was almost certain that she tried to picture me as her cheating husband. And she surely liked to use whips and cleavers. I didn’t want to give you the details. All I could say was that almost every one of them hurt me enough so that I blacked out, and went into the “dead state”.

However, I was not in my cage when I woke up this time. Instead, I was lying on a bed, and everything else was white in this room. The sound wave was on as I couldn’t move at all. A man dressed like a doctor came in, and started to talk, “Now, Viktor, you have been sent to our research facility since the latest client chopped off your left arm accidentally. We were able to put it back. However, your arm will not heal to the normal state, and you were evaluated as inferior by your previous company. So they sent you here to help us find some medical solutions for humans.” I always hoped that I could be executed if this kind of accident happened, but I was wrong as I was just transferred from one hell to another.

The doctors were no better than my previous sadistic clients. In order to find a better and faster solution to heal injuries on human bodies, I was constantly being wounded: cuts, burns, and broken bones. In different experimental conditions, they’d measure my healing rate, and took blood and bodily fluid from me. I was not going into the “dead state” anymore, but I was always conscious enough to feel the pain.

To pass those seemingly endless hours of torturing pain, all I did was to think of my past as a pure blooded vampire, a precious prince who was respected by every vampire, and feared by every human. Gold, silk, music, and books were my friends, as well as the other pure blooded vampires. We dominated the world for thousands of years, watching countless generations of our human slaves suffer and die. Once I pitied the humans, but now I know they are just as cold-blooded as us. (The End)

Story and layout by me.
Background image by t_zero on flickr.